by Evelyn James
“True,” O’Harris admitted. “You never seem to need me to play the knight in white armour coming to your aid. A less secure man might feel threatened by that.”
Clara tried to look annoyed, but his jest had lightened the atmosphere. She smiled.
“I agree there are hazards going abroad, though this is Belgium we are talking about, not some remote jungle full of tigers and cannibals,” Clara smirked. “I hear it is really quite civilised.”
“And, on the other hand,” Tommy interrupted, “it would surely be beneficial for you to have a guide, someone who knows what Belgium was like in the war and can guide you to the right places. You need someone with inside knowledge.”
“I cannot ask Emily to pay for a second fare, if the need arises,” Clara pointed out. “That is simply that.”
They were silent a moment, then O’Harris shrugged his shoulders.
“Look here, I am not exactly strapped for cash. I’ll pay an extra fare,” he said.
“You would accompany me?” Clara asked, feeling slightly eager at the idea. Clara and O’Harris had an understanding, they were not quite prepared to move that understanding on to an actual romance, but they were certainly heading that way.
“Ah,” O’Harris looked embarrassed. “I could not. The convalescence home is just up and running, I can’t leave things. I’m sorry. But I could pay for Tommy to go.”
“Me?” Tommy suddenly looked appalled. “Go back to France?”
“Belgium,” Clara corrected.
“Near enough!” Tommy stretched back from the table in horror. “I swore I would never set foot on foreign soil again after the war. Especially soil where I helped kill men.”
“One of us has to go, old man,” O’Harris coaxed. “I really can’t abandon my duties here. If I could I would have been delighted…”
“You don’t understand, I swore never to go back, never!” Tommy looked at them both with an accusing expression, as if they had just asked him to cut off an arm. “I promised myself, promised!”
Clara said nothing. She knew the demons Tommy had fought and did not want to push him to do something he was so clearly afraid of. She was not really worried about going to Belgium alone, it seemed like a good excuse for an adventure. She had never been to the country, but had heard it was beautiful, even in its war-torn state.
“I can’t go,” O’Harris repeated. “Maybe this is a prime opportunity for you to challenge your demons?”
“Whatever for?” Tommy glared at him. “Who says I have demons that need to be challenged?”
“It might not seem important,” O’Harris said steadily. “But the moment we say we can never do such and such a thing, we are instilling in ourselves a sense of defeat. It can spill out into our lives in other ways which we never expected.”
“Stop the mumbo-jumbo,” Tommy said crossly. “I am not defeated, I just have no intention of going back to a place where I nearly died, thank you very much!”
“What are you all arguing about?” Annie, the Fitzgeralds’ friend and housekeeper entered the dining room with a plate of freshly baked sausage rolls. “You are making such a racket. Where will you not go to Tommy?”
She punctuated her question by drawing a smaller plate out from under her arm and placing a sausage roll on it. She put this before Tommy.
“The meat is from a different butcher, I want to know your thoughts on the taste,” she continued, supplying each of them with a plate and sausage roll.
There was nothing like Annie’s cooking to defuse an argument. No one was going to remain so cross they could not enjoy sampling her food.
“I might be off to Belgium for a case,” Clara explained to Annie, since neither of the men were speaking. “The boys are arguing about who should accompany me.”
She almost rolled her eyes, but remembered Tommy and O’Harris were facing her just in time.
“Belgium,” Annie mused over the word. “I read about that a lot in the war. Seemed a nice place until the Germans marched in. Why don’t they just both go with you?”
“I can’t leave my convalescence home just at the moment,” O’Harris pointed out. “It would seem very wrong of me to up and leave my patients so soon after opening.”
“I am not going to Belgium,” Tommy was pouting again. “I swore I would never go back.”
“Oh well, Clara will just have to go alone,” Annie said, giving Clara a wink.
“No!” Both men said in unison.
Clara groaned.
“Really? I am sure there is no more harm going to come to me in Belgium than if I were in London.”
“I went with you to London, remember?” Tommy reminded her. “I know the trouble you get in to.”
“And out of,” Clara said proudly.
“You really are such big gooses,” Annie tutted at O’Harris and Tommy. “If you won’t let Clara go alone, which is daft, by the way, then you must decide on one of you going. And, as I see Captain O’Harris is in a bind, that leaves you, Tommy.”
“Annie, I can’t!”
“There is no such word as ‘can’t’ Mr Fitzgerald,” Annie told him sternly. “I said once, ‘I can’t cook pastry’ and my old mother said ‘can’t’ is an excuse for not putting in the effort. It took a long time, but now you are eating the result. Can’t is a very bad word.”
“That is different,” Tommy said sulkily. “And you know it is different.”
“Well, if needs be I will be going to Belgium,” Clara said calmly. “I really can see no way around it. Whether I am accompanied or not, I do not mind.”
Clara bit into her sausage roll.
“Nice pastry Annie.”
Annie smiled proudly.
Chapter Four
Emily kept her word and delivered all the papers and letters she could find concerning her brother. It came in a large box and Clara felt slightly daunted by the task of sorting through it all. To put off the moment, she sat down and composed a letter to Colonel Matthews and sent it off with the afternoon post. With any luck it would be with him in the morning.
Tommy came into the parlour and saw the large box on the table. His eyes widened.
“That is a lot of correspondence.”
“Father Lound was a prolific writer, by the looks. Those are only the letters he sent to his sister during the war.”
Tommy took a handful of letters out of the box and glanced at them, then he turned his attention to the other papers.
“What else is in here?”
“I don’t know entirely. I suppose there is the file Emily’s late husband compiled on her brother’s disappearance, and there are possibly papers concerning Lound’s seminary training and work in Belgium. Basically, anything Emily thought might be relevant. She is still trying to get hold of the letters he wrote to her parents, if they still exist.”
“Do you think it is odd Mr Lound was so quick to believe his son a traitor?” Tommy asked.
Clara frowned.
“How do you mean?”
“It is a shocking thing to be told about your only son. Yet, he seems to have just accepted the news, almost as if he had known something before?”
“A bit soon to be making inferences like that,” Clara replied. “Emily says he just accepted the news, but it may be her memory of events. It might actually have taken days, or weeks, for him to really accept the news. In the meantime, he did nothing as it seemed the safest option for his political career. I don’t think at this point we have to see it as anything but the selfish nature of the man.”
Tommy dug in the box deeper.
“Look at this,” he produced a large leaflet. It was high quality, the front and back pages printed on thick card and the contents professionally laid out. It was bigger than a standard pamphlet, about eight by ten inches. “St John’s Seminary, Worthing. Religious Education at the Highest Standards. I guess this is where Christian went to become a priest.”
Tommy flicked open the pamphlet.
“Very nice, the
y have their own tennis courts.”
“Might be worth contacting the seminary and seeing what their views on Christian were. I doubt they can tell me if he was a traitor to his country, but they might give me an insight into his temperament,” Clara took the pamphlet off Tommy and glanced through the pages. It was a brochure for a school like any other. There were stories of students who had achieved great things, lists of accolades the seminary had won, images and descriptions of the classrooms, sleeping quarters and curriculum. There were a lot of pictures of smiling priests.
“Do you want a hand going through all this?” Tommy pointed to the box.
“I wouldn’t mind,” Clara agreed. “I was thinking of starting by going through the contents and arranging items into three piles. One for documents I think can be useful for the case, one for documents completely irrelevant and one for documents I am not sure about.”
Tommy pulled up a chair to the table in the parlour and took a large handful of letters from the box which he gave to Clara. He took a second bundle for himself and they began to work. The task was time-consuming and many of the documents were irrelevant. Clara read letter after letter that kept to the same mundane topics of the weather, the services Christian had performed for the British troops and the latest book he was reading. Christian wrote so often, that the majority of his letters had to be filled with these somewhat boring subjects. Occasionally there was something more dramatic; one letter described how an artillery shell had landed not far from where Christian was holding mass and had showered him and his congregation with mud.
Clara could not help but wonder how much Christian had not mentioned in his letters to his sister. How much had he self-censored his own writing to avoid worrying Emily? There had to have been many more disturbing and upsetting situations occurring than he wrote about. If you took Christian’s letters at face value, it would almost appear as if nothing much was happening at all on the Front and everyone was really quite jolly, and people were not being blown-up, shot or buried alive on a regular basis.
“The letters feel like a dead-end to me,” Clara said to Tommy.
“Typical of the sort of stuff you write home,” Tommy nodded. “All the ordinary things you can think of, so as not to worsen the concerns of those left behind. I imagine most of my letters were the same.”
“They were,” Clara nodded. “You know, you could have been more open with me back then, if you had wanted to. I was not oblivious to what was occurring.”
“No,” Tommy shook his head. “In a way, writing the dull as dishwater letters was cathartic. It made you focus on the ordinary, sane stuff, rather than the madness that was happening all around. I didn’t want to put down in ink or graphite what I was enduring. Somehow that would have made it all the more real.”
Clara placed another letter into the ‘not relevant’ pile and gave a sigh.
“I wonder if Christian’s letters to his father were more insightful?”
“I have a hunch they have been all destroyed,” Tommy said grimly. “I just get the impression that was the sort of man he was. He made the effort to pretend his son never existed after he learned of the rumours. He would not have wanted to keep something so incriminating as letters.”
“Then we will never know if there might have been something in them that made Mr Lound have his own doubts about his son,” Clara added.
“Ah, so you are reconsidering my suggestion that he already had suspicions of something untoward, which made him quicker to accept the news that Christian was a traitor?” Tommy grinned.
“All right, I may be considering that possibility. But what I meant was that maybe Mr Lound sensed an undercurrent in his son’s writing that made his disappearance seem understandable. Maybe Christian sounded depressed in his letters to his father? Or wrote of the horrors he was witness to?”
“We’ll never know. I imagine you are not going to attempt to talk to Mr Lound?”
“I thought about it,” Clara admitted. “But the man is an accomplished politician and capable of avoiding answering any question put to him. I very much doubt I can persuade him to talk about his son. Though I never rule out anything.”
Clara had been glancing at a letter as she spoke, and suddenly she paused and drew the paper closer to her eyes.
“Tommy, does it look like something was removed from this letter?”
Clara handed over the paper. It was a thicker type of stationary than that which Christian had used later in the war. He had been writing in blue ink, but at one point it appeared that a word had been carefully scraped out with a knife, and another written on top. The paper showed the marks of the alteration, and there were faint traces of the previous word.
“I think you are right,” Tommy agreed. “Seems to me he has changed the name here.”
The sentence in the letter read; ‘there is an abandoned orchard nearby and I went with Ramon to collect apples for the children.’ Someone had scrubbed out a word in the space where ‘Ramon’ was written.
“Ramon has been mentioned in several letters,” Tommy noted.
“I found one where he is identified as an older Belgium boy who did odd jobs about Albion Hope and was given food and clothes in return for his family,” Clara quickly returned to the ‘irrelevant’ pile and went through the letters until she came to the one she meant. “Here it is. Ramon is described by Christian as being aged about sixteen and a keen sportsman. He says the boy has a mother and three sisters. His father is dead, and he would take on any work to help support his family.”
“But Ramon was not the original name written here,” Tommy said. He was tipping the paper from one side to the other, to try to get the light to catch on the altered section. “You don’t waste paper in a war. The wrong name was put here and rather than throw the sheet away and begin again, Christian did what he could to correct the mistake.”
“Are we making more of this than needs be?” Clara picked up another letter. “He accidentally wrote the wrong name in this letter too. He put ‘John’ from what I can make out, then crossed it through and wrote ‘Ramon’ next to it.”
“That’s the thing, I have seen him make errors in his other letters and he has just crossed them through and carried on,” Tommy said. “This is different. In this one he went to a great deal of effort to erase whatever was originally there. Maybe that is meaningless, or maybe it is significant. It is extremely hard to scrape ink off paper without simply ripping it. He must have spent ages picking out the original word.”
“What he would not be able to scrape out is the indentations his pen had made,” Clara added. “Try rubbing over the spot with a pencil and see if anything is revealed.”
She handed a pencil to her brother and he lightly rubbed the tip over the correction. The paper had become fluffy in this spot, as the pulp fibres had been pulled up by the work of the knife. The impressions made by the pen nib were therefore fuzzy and unclear. However, a letter B appeared where the R of Ramon now existed. The base of the B could be seen beneath the feet of the R. The next letters were difficult to make out, but the original name (for it seemed certainly to have been a name starting with a capital) appeared to have been longer than Ramon. Past the N of the replacement name there was a faint trace of ‘ice’. There was also a hint of a taller letter overwritten by the M. It might have been an L or a T, but it was certainly something that reached up higher than the loops of the M.
“I can’t work out the name, but there was something else here,” Tommy said. “Something he wanted to hide.”
Clara frowned as she studied the marks on the paper.
“I can think of a name,” she said. “But, I don’t want to get obsessed by one name in case I am wrong. I think we can agree the name begins with B, so let’s go through the letters and keep our eyes open for anyone Christian refers to with a name beginning with B.”
They went back to work and for a while were silent. The letters were frustratingly sparse in details on the people Christian socialised wit
h. Ramon was one of the few mentioned often and it felt as if Christian was fond of the boy, but his other colleagues and the people of the town were rarely listed. Clara was starting to feel this was deliberate, as if Christian was keeping his two worlds carefully divided. Yet, if that was the case, why was Ramon allowed to cross that divide? The boy was the only one to slip between both aspects of the priest’s life.
As the correspondence started to run out, Clara felt disheartened. There had been no mention of a person with a name beginning with B, and no further carefully erased errors.
Tommy had finished with his pile of letters and was dipping back into the box. He drew out a folded piece of paper, it was a newspaper clipping.
“I saw this mentioned in one of the letters,” he said to Clara. “The local mayor died in 1917. Natural causes, not because of the war. Christian conducted the funeral service. It was the first time he had officiated at a funeral, as usually the older priests took the task. He found it a very moving experience and wrote about it to Emily. He said he was sending her the newspaper clipping. I suppose he was a little proud of his first funeral.”
“Seems slightly odd,” Clara was surprised.
“Well, I think he was nervous about it. He had hinted about that in his letters. Guess he wanted to show his sister how well he did.”
Tommy flattened the clipping on the table and started to tentatively read it.
“It’s in French, of course,” he said. “Oh, here is the part where he is mentioned. ‘Father Christian Lound, a British Catholic priest, performed the service. His readings were considered appropriate and respectful by those gathered in attendance.’ Rather dull praise.”
“You can’t say much about a funeral service,” Clara shrugged. “Does it mention any other names? Such as one beginning with B?”
“Let’s see. There is a list of the pall-bearers, ah, here is Ramon. ‘Of the four pallbearers, the youngest was Monsieur Ramon Devereux, who, despite his youth, performed his task both nobly and with great dignity,” Tommy drew his finger down the paper. “It is very detailed, I suppose because it was the town mayor’s funeral. Here is a list of those who sent flowers and messages of sympathy. A bit further there is a detailed account of the mourners in attendance. I don’t know if in Belgium they rank the mourners in relation to the deceased – family first, then friends and business associates. There are a lot of names.”